Modeling a Decision Support Tool for Buildable and Sustainable Building Envelope Designs

Abstract

Sustainability and buildability requirements in building envelope design have significantly gained more importance nowadays, yet there is a lack of an appropriate decision support system (DSS) that can help a building design team to incorporate these requirements and manage their tradeoffs at once. The main objective of this study is to build such a tool to facilitate a building design team to take into account sustainability and buildability criteria for assessment of building envelopes of high-rise residential buildings in Singapore. Literature reviews were conducted to investigate a comprehensive set of the sustainability and buildability criteria. This also included development of the tool using a Quality Functional Deployment (QFD) approach combined with fuzzy set theory. A building design team was engaged to test the tool with the aim to evaluate usefulness of the tool in managing the tradeoffs among the sustainability and buildability criteria. The results from a qualitative data analysis suggested that the tool allowed the design team to effectively find a balance between the tradeoffs among the criteria when assessing multiple building envelope design alternatives. Main contributions of using this tool are achievement of a more efficient assessment of the building envelopes and more sustainable and buildable building envelope design.

The need for and benefits of buildability analysis: Nigeria as a case study

“…The first effort to address buildability was done by Sir Harold Emmerson when he recommended a new form of association between designers and builders (Jarkas, 2010). As noted by Singhaputtangkul and Low (2015), buildability plays a significant function in design and construction. Many definitions and interpretations of buildability have been invented or created in the literature and such works are attributed to the following authors: Ferguson (1989), Griffith (1987), Hyde (1996), Construction Industry Research and Information Association (CIRIA) (1983), Illingworth (1984), Construction Industry Institute (CII) (1986) and Fisher and Rajan (1996).…”

“…Buildability analysis focuses on buildability attributes to achieve good buildability. According to Singhaputtangkul and Low (2015), factors such as simplicity of design details, ease in material handling and construction have been suggested in the past for attaining good buildability. Crowther (2002) outlined three main criteria for achieving good buildability which include clear communication, standardisation and simplicity.…”

“…These procedures are achieved by way of amending the characteristics of the design and changing specifications (Mydin et al, 2011;Bamisile, 2013). Buildability takes into account all phases Benefits of buildability analysis 1207 of construction project and enables the optimum utilisation of construction resources (Singhaputtangkul and Low, 2015). The concept of buildability has been tested, used in several countries across the globe and confirmed to be very effective at optimising overall cost throughout the project life cycle (Aina and Wahab, 2011).…”

A decision support tool to mitigate decision-making problems faced by a building design team

“…This includes, for example, delays, increase in expenses, increase in manpower of a building project, poor professional relationship, and poor client satisfaction (Arain and Low, 2005; Fryer, 2004; Hwang et al , 2014, 2015). Hence, there is a need for a building design team to mitigate the decision-making problems for avoidance of such undesirable effects (Singhaputtangkul and Low, 2015).…”

Εκτίμηση Της Κατασκευασιμότητας Τεχνικών Έργων Βάσει Της Ανάλυσης Κινδύνων

“…2012, Jelodar κ.ά. 2013, Zhong 2013, Ogburn και El-Adaway 2014b, Aina 2015, Singhaputtangkul και Low 2015, Zhong και Peng 2015, Brennan και Venigalla 2016, Nguyen 2016, είτε για συγκεκριμένα θέματα, όπως την επιλογή και χρήση των κατάλληλων δομικών υλικών (Slater 2002, Thomas 2010, Harley κ.ά. 2011, Balaguera κ.ά.…”